Some food-related (mostly) things we enjoyed this past week:

We tend to get in a rut when it comes to breakfast — having the same couple of dishes over and over — so we tried something new this week.  We love smoked salmon and usually serve it on toasted English muffins with cream cheese and chopped red onion.  This time, we ditched the muffin, spread the cream cheese on a tortilla, added layers of salmon, chopped green onion, hard-boiled egg and slices of cucumber and celery for crunch, then rolled it up and cut it into several pieces.  It was delicious and will be added to our breakfast rotation.

You can tell it’s been a bit of an off week when a Friday Favorite is an out-of-focus picture of our cats at the vet.  But the older they get (they’re around 12 or 13 we think), the more relieved we are when they have an excellent check-up result.  Livestrong, Kitties!  (Too soon?)

We tried spaghetti squash for the first time this week and considered it a success.  No doubt we enjoyed it mostly because of the sauce we drenched served it with.  Dear friends of ours gave us a pasta-of-the-month subscription from Pennsylvania Macaroni Co. for Christmas this year, and our first delivery included a jar of the homemade Eggplant Sauce.  We loved it!  The sauce was rich and tangy with hints of basil and garlic, and no vegetable-y taste whatsoever.  Spaghetti squash looks like spaghetti (hence the name, how clever), but the texture is more crisp than pasta.  Once you get used to the texture, it’s actually pretty good, especially when you keep in mind how healthy it is.  It’s also really easy to make — just cut the squash in half (that’s the hardest part), place it cut-side-down in a baking dish, fill the baking dish halfway with water, cover the dish with foil, then bake at 375 degrees for about 45 minutes.  Uncover the squash halves and carefully turn them over, then re-cover with foil and bake for another 15 minutes.  Allow the squash to cool a bit, then scoop out the seeds with a spoon and discard.  Use a fork to pull the “spaghetti” pieces away from the rind and that’s it!  We might not have liked it as much without such an amazing sauce (thanks Paula and Matt!), but we’ll make it again.  Maybe next time as a healthy side to complement a giant slab of veal parmesan.

Some food-related (mostly) things we enjoyed this past week:

Dan has renewed his obsession experimentation with homemade bread.  Specifically, he’s working on perfecting the Dutch-oven-baked, boule-style bread.  Actually, rather than perfect, we’ll settle for crusty outside and less-dense-than-a-hockey-puck inside.  Out of three loaves this week, we got one with a perfect crust but dense middle (see above), another with a beautifully airy inside and weirdly over-floured outside, and one that was mediocre inside and out.  To be continued.

Just a few weeks post-Christmas (but still less than a month!), we finally packed up the trees and all the Christmas decor.  We blame the delay on attempting to pack everything in a more organized manner this year (hooray for new bins with matching lids that don’t have to be duct-taped shut, decorations organized by room/purpose, and labels!)  Dan is always a little sad to see the Christmas stuff get put away in the attic (possibly because he is the one who has to actually be in the attic, storing the bins that I pass up to him), but the Scrooge organizer in me loves to have my house and all of its stuff back in order after the holidays.

We made our first batch of green chile chowder so far this season.  It’s rich, creamy, hearty and a little bit spicy — perfect for a chilly winter evening.

“Dinner salad” takes on a whole new meaning when you add grilled steak, caramelized onions, fresh tomatoes and homemade blue cheese vinaigrette.

Dan had a quick work trip to Palo Alto, CA this week — one of his (and my) favorite places, in no small part due to the Calzone Quattro Stagioni at Cafe Renzo.  It doesn’t get much better than perfect pizza dough filled with salami, prosciutto, artichokes and mushrooms, baked until golden brown, then topped with a light marinara sauce.  Dan loves this lunch so much that I’m pretty sure this is not its first appearance on Friday Favorites.  And probably will not be its last.

Some food-related (mostly) things we enjoyed this past week:

My aunt, uncle and cousins from Oklahoma have an annual tradition of driving to the Houston area to spend the New Year’s holiday with family there.  For several years now, they have stopped at the Bavarian Grill in Plano for lunch along the way, which just happens to be about 15 minutes from our house.  This year, they invited us to join them and we’re so glad they did!  The food was amazing (I had the jí¤ger schnitzel with spí¤tzel, pictured above), the company even better, and we all wondered why we had never met up for this annual lunch before.  Suddenly, a new tradition is born.  Can’t wait for next year’s feast, Levy’s!

A big bowl of Cajun BBQ shrimp and a loaf of crusty bread hit the spot on a cold evening.  We like this recipe, which is also really quick and easy to make.  If you don’t have access to fresh shrimp, frozen “EZ Peel” shrimp will work fine — just be sure to use the big ones and leave the shells on when you cook them.

My brother J has always been a creative guy, and one of his artistic outlets is origami.  We spent Christmas at a lakehouse with my side of the family this year, and my brother spent a bit of his down-time creating a little family of giraffes out of colorful paper.  I snagged this one (named George) and put him in a shadow-box frame to hang on our picture gallery wall.  Thanks J!

We continued our New Year’s Eve tradition of staying in and cooking something a little more fancy or elaborate than our usual dinners — this year with braised short ribs (post coming soon.)  The melt-in-your-mouth tender ribs in the silky, richly sophisticated sauce made for a perfectly celebratory year-end meal.  And don’t even get us started on the leftovers, which we served over egg noodles with a little Worcestershire sauce, channeling my grandmother’s beef and noodles.  So good.

We’re not big on year-end wrap-ups or new year resolutions, but we do appreciate the fresh-start, clean-slate feelings that come with a new calendar, and we look forward to seeing what 2013 has in store.  Happy New Year!